MileinCosman_Lichtzeichnungen von Anja Manfredi

Cosman’s pictures have become much better known than
the artist herself who signed them. An extraordinary facet of
her multifarious oeuvre is a large number of drawings of the
dance phenomena of her time, made with Conté pencils in
the darkness of London theaters during the late 1940s and
1950s: “It was an obsession for me, drawing.” In Warburg’s
manner, Milein Cosman was a collector of poses from various
dance cultures, be it India, Cambodia, Japan, China, be
it African American, Spanish or South American movement
motifs.
In her ‘collection’ of dances and her ‘free’ sketching of motor
actions, an all-pervading equivalence of dance forms of expression
is evident. Almost childlike and at the same time technically
precise, she transfers her aesthetic perception of movement
to paper. Ultimately, we chose this aspect as our artistic
and curatorial figurehead and intertwined it into the realization
of the project with one of Milein Cosman’s repeatedly
invoked memories: the unbreakable bond of friendship. In
the film interview, she speaks of the “love” she had for her
four friends during her youth in Germany, as if she had had
“four wonderful sisters.” In the heyday of the Nazi-founded
League of German Girls, she formed an “Indian band” with
them as a “counterforce to the Nazi gang,” a “blood sisterhood
in the garden arbor” in which religious or ‘genetic’ origins
are irrelevant: in retrospect, Milein Cosman called this
initiative “unconsciously clever.”
For the second part of the reenactment – that is, of her dance
sketches – our ensemble was, almost as a matter of course,
expanded to include Linda Samaraweerová. Firstly, she herself
choreographs transmedially at the interface of sculpture,
installation, performance, dance, theater, video and film. Secondly,
living and working in Vienna, she was able to identify
directly with Milein Cosman’s multifaceted dance-related
oeuvre through her biography linking two cultures (Czechia/
Sri Lanka). And finally, the bond of friendship has connected
the three of us – Anja Manfredi, Linda Samaraweerová and
me – ever since our joint reenactment project on Grete Wiesenthal’s
Waltz Dances of Modernity (2008).
The dance-related reenactment of Milein Cosman is determined
by the associative image selection of our ‘small’ ensemble,
which, on the one hand, is based on the phenomenon of
the ‘punctum’ described epochally for photography by Roland
Barthes: the direct concern, 4 the affectedness. On the other
hand, the selection follows a specific curatorial criterion: the
aim was to choose sketches based on particular poses and
movements of dancers from different cultural contexts. The
present-oriented reenactment perspective is rather decisively
characterized methodologically by not doing exactly what
Jorge Louis Borges described so incredibly aptly in his story
“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1939) and makes
evident as ‘nonsensical’.
4 See Roland Barthes: Die helle Kammer, Bemerkung zur Photographie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985.